Kiwi Flights

What are Kiwi Flights?

 As somebody who has spent the majority of his life traveling or in the pursuit of travel, I have encountered more travel accommodation sites than I care to count. I have used some of the best sites for booking flights, I have witnessed some of the worst, and, more often than not, the travel sites that I encounter are just mediocre at best. I think that you might be surprised by how wide the spectrum of quality is when it comes to cheap flight sites.

In other words, not all airfare search engines are created equal. There are some that do an impeccable job of providing an easy to use the list of the cheapest flights available from hundreds of different sites, some that offer a wide variety of different sources but don’t tend to provide the most affordable options, and some that only draw from their own deals and don’t make it possible at all to compare between multiple sites. What, then, do we look for when we are looking for the best cheap flight sites?

Well, first of all, you definitely want your flight booking site of choice to cast the widest net possible. This is because, of course, the more listings that a site makes available, the more competitive the listings become. In other words, you are more likely to be able to find the cheapest flight. The fewer listings a flight booking site provides, the less likely you are to be able to book the most affordable flight to your destination of choice!

Beyond that, though, you also want a cheap flight site that provides an intuitive, user-friendly, and features-rich interface. This is not just about aesthetics. An easier to use interface means a smoother experience. I don’t want to have to work too hard in order to take advantage of the search tools that a cheap flight site has to offer. The site itself should be the one doing the heavy lifting when it comes to helping you find your ideal flight, not the other way around.

When I first visited Kiwi Flights, I was blown away. It seems to tick all the boxes that I look for on a good flight booking website. Kiwi Flights offers some of the best ticket prices that I have ever seen (prices that are sometimes a third or a quarter of similar bookings that I’ve found elsewhere for the same dates and locations).

Not only that, but  Kiwi Flights also has a dynamic site design that is as easy to use as it is effective in letting you compare and contrast flight prices. You don’t have to work very hard at all to find the best deals on Kiwi – it’s all done for you – but there are plenty of ways to customize the search results to even the most specific parameters.

Kiwi Flights, though, does not only allow users to book cheap flights (even though that is certainly their specialty). In addition to buying plane tickets, you can also use Kiwi Flights to rent cars and book rooms. Oh, and did I mention that the site has a pretty decent travel blog that is worth checking out as well? Kiwi.com has the potential to become a one-stop shop for your major travel needs.

Add to all of this the fact that Kiwi Flights is also incredibly mobile friendly (thanks to a formidable app), and you have the makings of one of the best sites for cheap flight bookings on the market today. If you’re looking for a longstanding name you can trust when it comes time to book your next flight, Kiwi.com should be on the top of your list.

Who owns Kiwi Flights?

Kiwi.com is a Czech flight booking and travel accommodation site that was founded in 2012 by Oliver Dlouhy and Josef Kepesi. Before Kiwi Flights, though, this pair of entrepreneurs created an online portal, Sky Picker, in 2011. In fact, it wasn’t until 2016 that the company purchased the domain name for Kiwi.com for $800,000. This led them to undergo a universal rebrand as Kiwi.com (which is precisely what I would do, too, if I spent $800,000 on a domain name).

In 2017, Kiwi.com bought stake in Jaroslav Kokolus. And, as of 2019, the company’s major shareholder is the American growth equity firm, General Atlantic. Kiwi’s original founders, though, Dlouhy and Kepesi remain major shareholders to this day, and they continue to run the company. Obther shareholders include Touzimsky Airlines and Luos Charcenko, making Kiwi.com’s board of directors a rather diverse one.

Over the years, Kiwi.com has grown into one of the largest and most popular airfare metasearch engines on the web. Today, the site handles over 100 million daily searches, selling roughly 33,000 flights per day. The company employs more than 2,600 people (as of 2019), and made a rather ambitious announcement in November of 2019, saying that it plans to become the world’s first Virtual Global Supercarrier. This is just a fancy way of saying that Kiwi plans to basically become the Amazon of global transport – for air, land, and sea – providing the widest selection of on-demand transport of any company in the world.

So, if you’ve never heard of Kiwi Flights before today, there is a good chance (should they succeed in this goal) that they will be a household name in the next 5 years or so.

How does Kiwi Flights website look like?

In my experience, it’s rare to find an airline booking site that is able to pull of a clean, neat, and minimalistic interface. This makes sense to me, given the nature of how much content and information needs to be conveyed on each page. Kiwi.com, though, seems to have been able to pull this off to great effect.

I don’t believe, to my memory, that I’ve ever seen a neater or more clean-cut booking site than this one. The designers behind this site have managed to make excellent use of negative space, probably by downsizing many of the usual booking site elements to make them slimmer, less cluttered. The search bar, for instance, is, I would estimate, maybe half the size of the usual flight booking search bar (without excluding any of the important search elements).

Plug in all of your parameters – where you’re flying from, your destination, departure and return dates, type of seating, number of passengers, number of bags, etc. – in front of an idyllic misty hillside vista, offering a sense of peace and tranquility to reassure you through the process. Below this, you’ll find a selection of recent searches, allowing you to quickly jump back in and track your previous searches (which, as I’m sure you know, is beyond convenient when it comes to tracking flights from several different departing airports).

Keep scrolling down, though, and you’ll find a selection of travel packages that were “picked just for you,” based on your Kiwi Flights search history. Kiwi Flights is an elegant site that manages to personalize and declutter content that is too often impersonal and overwhelming to navigate on other sites.

 How does Kiwi Flights work?

 When it comes to features, the first thing that I want to discuss is the Kiwi.com guarantee. This is something that not every flight booking site offers but that more should. The Kiwi.com guarantee protects its users from the potential pitfalls of airline travel. If you miss a connection due to a delay, schedule change, or cancellation, Kiwi.com has you covered.

The site will automatically get you onto the next available flight with no additional charge to you. As somebody who has been unfortunate enough to experience this on more than one occasion, this safety net is enough to make me book with Kiwi Flights whenever possible. This is particularly helpful, too, because of the combined nature of many cheap flight sites’ bookings (seldom do the cheapest deals put you on one airliner with no transfers or connecting flights). With Kiwi Flights, you don’t have to worry about this as much. What a relief!

What I also love about this flight booking site is the fact that, due to Kiwi’s unique “virtual interlining” concept, you’ll be able to find deals from many airlines that don’t normally participate in online bookings. In total, Kiwi Flights provides flights from over 750 airlines, making it one of the largest and most diverse on the web. What does this mean for you? Well, it means that you’ll be able to find the most competitive prices. I’m not even exaggerating … I saw some air tickets on Kiwi Flights for unheard of low prices. If you want to find the cheapest flights, Kiwi.com is the site for you.

Does kiwi.com have an APP?

In addition to providing a great desktop site, there is a Kiwi.com app as well. Although I think that the app is a perfectly fine way to access Kiwi Flights huge selection of flight deals, it is not quite the highest-rated app in the Apple App Store for travel accommodations. Nevertheless, I found it to be a smooth and easy way to book flights on the go. In addition to iOS, the app is also available on Android devices.